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Colossus - The Greatest Secret in the History of Computing

The Centre for Computing History · 1M views · 2020-05-04 · 1:00:26

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Overview

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as an excellent deep dive on the real Colossus, full of stories about unsung engineers.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2022–2024

Topics

History of computing
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colossusbletchley parkwwii codebreakingearly computers

What people said

hoten · 2024-05 · Strong recommendation

I forget the details, but I recall this video on the Colossus- a very secretive program that resulted in arguably the first programmable digital computer (iirc). I think we only relatively recently learned of it's existence? [VIDEO] It was very worth the watch, lots of fascinating tidbits including some stories of unsung heroes / geniuses. It was kept secret even after WWII but the people involved went off to kickstart the computer industry in England

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jazzyjackson · 2022-03 · Strong recommendation

To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to "leak" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was successful) OTOH, mass deception of a population is a little newer, and anytime Russian PSYOPS are brought up I like to drop this link [1] about US Army developing social media "sockpuppets" back in 2011, years before we ever heard of the Internet Research Agency (founded in 2013 if wiki is credible) Now that the disinformation cat is out of the bag, I wonder what kind of internal fact checking tools the Army uses to separate fresh SIGINT from trash. The videos purportedly coming out of Ukraine are impossible to sort through, the strangest thing to me was seeing hundreds of accounts post the same video, instead of quote tweeting or retweeting or linking to a source, just, 'I've never mentioned Ukraine before but here's a video of what's happening right now!' [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

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jgalt212 · 2024-04 · Recommendation

a nice video on the real thing by the inimitable Professor Brailsford. [LINK] And a longer, deeper dive (also very good). [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by The Centre for Computing History, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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